Despite my love for the base game, I struggled with this expansion. The story is one of the few things I enjoyed about it, it's relatively generic overall but it's centred around Melia who was my favourite character in the base game so I enjoyed it a lot for that reason. As for the gameplay, while it's almost identical to the base game, they removed chain attacks for some reason which was one of the most fun parts of Xenoblade's combat system for me. The new characters are two Nopon who are gameplay-wise identical to Reyn and Sharla. I found them fun at first but the novelty wore off fast and by the end, I just found them annoying. Finally, the last boss was one of the most frustrating bosses I've ever fought. I genuinely considered giving up because of how much I hated that fight but I remember casual mode exists; I'm not the type to lower the difficulty for the sake of a boss in games, I usually have too much pride for that, but I really didn't care with this boss and was just glad it was over.

I'd only recommend this expansion for the story, it's worth it for the Melia content but not much else outside of that.